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some lesser vampire who might give me a clue as to where Radu could be found. Still, I more than half
expected to discover my brother himself gloating over fresh corpses, the day's harvest of San-son's
guillotine. Of course the blood so prodigally wasted there would be stale, chill, clotting, well past its peak
of flavor and nourishment. But there would be in what was left a tang of despair, of ultimate fear. It was
suffering, and the evidence of suffering, that attracted Radu more than blood.
Actually Radu could tell, by the shadings of flavor in the blood, that some of these condemned had gone
to their doom tranquilly, at peace with the world that was about to eject them. Or at least he had
convinced himself that it was so.
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In 1792, beginning a methodical attempt to locate my younger sibling, and knowing his penchant for
cities, the bigger the better, I thought I could not do better than to spend some time in Paris, then
indisputably the greatest metropolis of Europe. I had not visited France for some time there is
something in widespread and oppressive poverty that depresses the spirit of the onlooker.
During the last decades of the eighteenth century it had appeared to me, as it did to many another
observer, that a great social upheaval impended in France. Since 1789 I had been convinced that
something of the kind was imminent. I think my claim as I make it now is not mere hindsight. A society of
such archetypal injustice and widespread desperation was doomed to fail. The monarchy was stupid and
inert, oppressive accidentally and lazily rather than efficiently. Everyone who had eyes to see and ears to
hear, and who thought about the matter at all, must have seen that the old world was straining and
struggling to give birth to something new. But until the fall of the Bastille in 1789, and the virtual
imprisonment of the king and queen which soon followed, I, and many others, had not bestowed on these
phenomena the attention they deserved; wenosferatutend to believe that politics and social structures
among the breathers have only marginal effect upon our lives. The truth is that I viewed the impending
cataclysm rather smugly as regards its effect upon myself.
How wrong I was.
The sprawling palace of the Tuileries, and the extensive gardens adjoining, lay between the Rue de Rivoli
and the north bank of the Seine. A year or two before I came to those gardens looking for my brother,
they had been a favorite strolling place of the French king, Louis XVI (who was always much more
interested in his hobby of locksmithing, and in hunting, than in politics), and his queen, Marie Antoinette
(an unhappy Austrian spendthrift, who never quite understood anything that was going on). Often the
royal couple had been accompanied on these walks by their two small children.
But in France those apparently tranquil days were gone, never to return. Of late the royal family had not
been much seen by the public, except on the several occasions when their privacy had been invaded by
an angry mob.
That August morning, unpleasantly warm and humid, found me not in the best of tempers; I had been out
since around midnight, looking for Radu as usual, and had prolonged my search well into the hours which
were counted by sundials. Throughout most of that summer I had spent a great many of my waking hours
trying to locate my brother, and with Radu on my mind, what sleep I managed to obtain tended to be
very light indeed.
Wearing my customary daytime costume of broad hat and a flowing cloak, making my way
uncomfortably through summer sunlight from one spot of shade to the next, I gradually progressed along
the edge of the vast garden of the Tuileries.
On the tenth of August the traditional function of the place as a parade ground for fashionable strollers
had been violently pre-empted. This time the mob was vastly greater than before. There had been cannon
fire, and a fierce fight with the Swiss Guards, mercenaries who were more loyal to the French crown than
the French themselves were turning out to be.
From a distance of thirty yards or so, I observed, with disapproval, that the spot I had chosen as my
next observation post was already occupied. There beneath a chestnut tree stood with folded arms a lone
male figure with a bearing at once youthful and military, though at the moment in rather shabby though
well-cut civilian clothes. Here was one man not trying to emulate the Revolutionary prototype of the
sans-culotte no red cap or huge mustache or workman'scarmagnolejacket for him.
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This young man, whose bearing and attitude suggested an army officer in mufti, was sheltering on the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]